


Meet Me by "The Tree" at Night Sometime

by orphan_account



Series: Stay True to Yourself, but Only Sometimes [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Substance Abuse, dont worry we'll get to the shipping soon enough, dubcon in background relationships, hopefully i wont orphan this in one of my breakdowns of "oh god im so messed up", possibly self harm but idk if im going down that road, sigh, tw for panic attacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 17:06:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2436347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat isn't the promising child his elementary school teachers thought he would be. In fact, he's quite the opposite. As a boy who failed the seventh grade, he spends most of his afternoons behind a crappy diner with a pack of other morons who don't care about anything.</p><p>Jade does pretty well in school, but maybe not as good as people think. The stress is getting to her, and instead of pushing herself harder as she usually does, she decides to take a break and relax for once. </p><p>It's not love at first sight, and some would gossip and say they never loved each other at all, and it was just some sort of mutually agreed "relationship" to make themselves not seem so desperate. </p><p>Rumors are almost never true, Jade always said with a smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meet Me by "The Tree" at Night Sometime

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are known to be “bad news” among the more typical students.

 

Everyone knows your (abnormal) name, even teachers from elementary schools you’ve never been to, and they don’t know it because you’re some kind of prodigy. Wherever you go, a putrid stench of drugs, alcohol, dirt, and death in general follows you. You’ve grown somewhat “immune” to it, but no one else has, shown by how, if given a choice, no one sits next to you in any of your classes except for this guy Cronus, who even you don’t want to be associated with. He’s something of a desperate whore. You almost feel bad for the freshman girls (and the occasional boy) that he’ll fuck a couple times before dumping. They’ll never be able to get over that, poor saps. 

When you’re not lighting one up behind a rundown diner or some such, you can be found in your room, listening to music turned all the way up, hoping to become deaf some day and not have to listen to the pathetic droning on of all the idiots of the world. Sometimes you’ll bother with some coding and make a weak-ass virus or something that makes one more ad pop up than usual, but you’ve lost interest in that over the last few years. Painting used to be an interest of yours as well, but you have lost interest in that as well. You used to have a passion for romantic movies, but you got sick of seeing things you figured you’d never have. Romance is a pretty sore subject with you, and at this point you don’t even want to hear the word. Bleh!   
\--  
You reflect on the day of school you have just finished. It was pretty ordinary, and you only got called a gross faggot once. That’s an improvement! You are /trying/ to become a more decent person, but failing miserably. Doing your math homework twice a week is not changing your life as much as you had hoped, and taking a shower more than once a month is still not enough to get people to stop cringing when they see your acne covered face. 

You sigh, lifting a cheap cigarette to your lips and lighting it up. A couple of preppy boys are fighting by the “weed tree”, as they do every day. They don’t even smoke, and you knew that if they weren’t popular idols they’d be banned from the place. You think that they should start puffing and calm it down for once; it would be a pleasant change. About five boys you’ve seen around the halls are doing the same thing as you, keeping to themselves and leaning against the wall of Quickies, the best place to get terrible food on the go. The staff is pretty lax on “legal issues,” and you guess that’s why everyone hangs out here, if it matters. Two chubby girls are sitting side by side, holding hands and looking at something on the one girl’s phone and laughing. They both are wearing nebula leggings, combat boots, and short black pleated skirts. One’s shirt advertises some sort of obscure-in-the-average-world-but-well-known-in-the-weirdo-realm band, and the other is wearing a black sweater with a bloody rose on it. You forget their names, but you think that one of them is named Clair or some shit. The most out of place member of the odd collection of stoners and other people with little future is a businesswoman in a purple suit that never does any drugs, and never participates in any risky behavior. People tend to not talk about her or interact with her; probably because they’re afraid she’s going to call the cops one of these days. She’s chatting with one of the more decent high school boys and it gives you a weird vibe. Her hand drifts over to his cheek, and he backs away, and she paints a look of hurt on her face, pouting, saying something to him and taking a step closer. You look away quickly and drift into la-la land, slipping into a serene state where you can forget your current problems and how fucked up everyone here is. It’s nice. That tree, you mean. The leaves at the top of it are just starting to redden and a couple of them have fallen down; you figure that in a week or so it will be bare.   
\--  
Home isn’t high on your list of places that you like to be. You have a decent house, but your family is literally the worst, and you can’t stand anyone in it. Your two brothers are bickering about politics at the table, predictably. This seems to be all they ever do anymore, and you swear they have no lives. The older, chubbier one slams his milk down on the table hard in frustration and some of it splashes out and gets all over the younger, wiry one’s newspaper. Kankri is usually pretty calm, but he does have a reachable breaking point. “I told you not to do that anymore! Don’t you ever listen to me?!” he shrieks in his painfully childlike voice, and you resist the urge to cringe in physical pain. “I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t such a whiny whore!” Sign replies aggressively. Rolling your eyes, you scurry up the stairs and slip into your room, closing the door as quietly as possible, trying to avoid a run-in with your father, as he is not a pleasant man. He has a shorter fuse than you, astonishingly. You can sort of hear him talking to his girlfriend in his room, and you don’t want to think about what they’re talking about. Their relationship is without a doubt gross. She constantly wears this one red dress that is far too short that she has to keep pulling down and he keeps pinching her nearly non-existent ass and telling her nasty things that she giggles to. For once you and your brothers can agree on something: the whole situation between them is vomit inducing. When he’s not borderline fucking the girl (who is 24) he is usually breaking into your room to throw some kind of garbage at you. As the youngest, you are usually the one that people blame things on even if they had nothing to do with you. Instead of thinking rationally, you usually explode right back at them and call them out on their bullshit. You swear they like fighting with you. It makes you sick. It would make you even sicker if you didn’t like fighting with them as well.

Your room is sort of a disaster, if “sort of a disaster” is code for “literally trash island in the shady neighborhoods of hell,” and you think that even that is a bit of an understatement. There isn’t even a path to your bed or anything, so you just kind of walk on top of the four-inch-thick layer of solidified soda cans, candy wrappers, homework, and clothes. After falling down just once, you make it to your bed and roll over to the semi clean part where your pile of important stuff is, aka two pens, your iPod, a charger, earbuds, your current dystopian novel, and a couple of other unrecognizable objects. You don’t throw away the unrecognizable objects because you are not one for throwing things out, and even if you were cleanly, you’d be paranoid that you’d find whatever they originally belonged to the instant the garbage truck came. You scratch your back and scoff, you are always itchy and uncomfortable, and day by day your body is becoming harder to live in. Pink marks start to weave around your torso where you scratch, and you start to bleed in a couple of spots. It’s usually not this bad and you try to stop but you feel like you’re being eaten alive and suddenly all you can see is blood and you’re drowning and can’t breathe and you know that you’re just in your room and everything is fine and normal but you still can’t breathe and your ears are ringing and it’s taking all your effort to not start screaming like a maniac and you’re still so itchy but you can finally get a breath in at least-

A half hour later you’re in the bath and still panting. You’ve been having more and more of these panic attacks lately, and they’ve been taking their toll. Whenever you have one you’re so tired that you’re not good for anything for the rest of the day, not to mention that you have quite a few marks on your skin where your fingernails cut in too deep. As you stumble up the stairs in your underwear and enter your room, you try not to think about the piles of trash and you simply climb into your bed and slip into sweet sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry that the pace isn't consistent, im not too good with writing


End file.
